Forum Series: Performance as Perversion

The recent performative approach to Western classical genres has revealed fascinating insights into various mechanisms used by orchestral players in music-making. In one case, qualitative empirical work established the use of bodily and metaphorical gestures for musical expression (Prior 2011). In another case, technological comparisons between live and recording situations refuted all possibility of performative consistencies (Blier-Carruthers 2010). To supplement these experimental interventions, Pow relies on a socio-linguistic approach to frame 'rehearsal talk' as predicated upon the psychical states of interaction and reflection. The analysis based on the aesthetically challenging late quartets of Beethoven remains congruent with the exegetic history of ‘conversational’ working relations (Bayley 2011; Hunter 2012). Pow contends in tandem that the socio-textual positionings (or lack thereof) afford a more subjective theory of personal perversion that shapes musical ipseity and intimacy.

Dr. Pow Jun Kai is a cultural historian and musicologist specializing in Germanic and Singapore cultures of the twentieth century. He completed his PhD in Historical Musicology at King’s College London under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Prof. Martin Stokes. Jun is the co-editor of Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City (National Library Board, 2014), and Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (Hong Kong University Press, 2012), and is currently co-editing two separate volumes on Schoenberg studies and Sinophone musics.

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